Tag Archives: Virginia Woolf

This pearlmoonplenty is lengthier than most; the author asks her readers’ indulgence for her own.

My dear Virginia

How much I like getting letters from you.

With what zest do they send me to meet the day.

So much do I like getting them, that I keep them as the last letter to open of my morning post, like a child keeps the bit of chocolate for the end—

Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, 2 September 1925

Virginia Woolf was born 130 years ago today. She has long been an important writer and role model for me, but I didn’t know much about Woolf’s seventeen-year relationship with Vita Sackville-West until friends gave me The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf for Christmas. Reading these letters not only introduced me to intriguing aspects of Woolf’s life, but also inspired an appreciation for Sackville-West beyond her historical status as Woolf’s lover, friend, and muse behind her most imaginative character and novel, Orlando. A poet and novelist herself, Sackville-West strode through Woolf’s life in breeches and pearls, a devotee of Woolf’s artistic genius and maternal protector of Woolf’s fragile health and self-confidence.

The book contains all the surviving letters written by Sackville-West to Woolf, as well as relevant excerpts from Woolf’s letters to “My dear Vita.” Together they sketch a charged and complex friendship that evolved from romance to affection to deep appreciation and support between two avant garde women well matched in their conflicting personal desire for love and independence.

Begun in 1923 when Sackville-West invites Woolf to join the P.E.N. club of which she was a member (an invitation Woolf politely declined—she was no joiner), the letters continue until March 22, 1941, six days before Woolf’s suicide. Woolf’s last letter did not allude to her ensuing madness and her death shocked Sackville-West, who years later confided to her husband, “I still think that I might have saved her if only I had been there and had known the state of mind she was getting into.” Perhaps that help was something Woolf intended to avoid.

Both women had been raised with the privilege of English upper-class consciousness but were determined to live beyond the gendered expectations for propriety it bestowed. Sackville-West used her aristocratic position and open marriage to a diplomat to shape a life of sexual freedom and world travel; ten years older, Woolf used her intellectual capacities and marriage to a supportive husband to pursue literary achievements that have earned her lasting renown. Their letters portray a mutual impulse for pushing life to its edge, an emotional necessity for Sackville-West, while for Woolf, an artistic one.

As their relationship turned from recognition of each other’s social rebellion to a more intimate level of affection, they often used pet names or their own pets to express their feelings. Days after their short-lived sexual affair began, Woolf referred to Sackville-West as a “dear old rough coated sheep dog,” an image she repeated over the years, while Sackville-West jokingly referred to Woolf as “Potto,” a name Woolf created for the child-like creature she became in her desire for Vita: “Potto kisses you and says he could rub your back and cure it by licking.”

Over the years, both women used letter-writing to discuss their ideas about writing that reveal important insights into both their literary styles. For Sackville-West, Woolf is the writer to whom her own writing can never compare: “[Passenger to Teheran] is a rambling, discursive sort of affair. And I think of your lovely books, and despair.” She complains that Woolf has “the mot juste [Flaubert’s term for the “right word”] more than any modern writer” she knows: “I wonder whether it costs you a lot of thought or trouble, or springs ready-armed like Athene from the brow of Zeus? I don’t believe it does cost you trouble (confound you!) because you have it in your letters too, where you certainly haven’t made a draught (draft?), and where there is never anything but an impatient scratching or two.”

Woolf sidesteps this compliment by debating literary strategy instead: “As for the mot juste, you are quite wrong. Style is a very simple matter; it is all rhythm. Once you get that you can’t use the wrong words.” For Woolf, rhythm “goes far deeper than words”: “A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, . . . and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it.” [Click here for the only surviving recording of Woolf, speaking in a radio broadcast about words]

Although their writing was quite different in style and story, their letters share a concern for novelistic form. Writing from Germany in 1928, Sackville-West begins to imagine her novel The Edwardians (for which she and the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press made a nice sum) as “a sort of patch-work counterpane . . . beginning to form, but so far the patches are only laid side by side and I have not yet begun to stitch at them.” Wondering whether it is better to “fail gloriously than dingily succeed” (the clear answer for Sackville-West being the former), she concludes that “one’s pen, like water, always finds its own level, and one can’t write in any way other than one’s own.”

Woolf’s reply reflects the anguish she experienced about form and voice echoed in her diaries: “I believe that the main thing in beginning a novel is to feel, not that you can write it, but that it exists on the far side of a gulf, which words can’t cross: that its to be pulled through only in a breathless anguish. Now when I sit down to an article, I have a net of words which will come down on the idea certainly in an hour or so. But a novel, as I say, to be good should seem before one writes it, something unwriteable: but only visible; so that for nine months one lives in despair, and only when one has forgotten what one meant, does the book seem tolerable. I assure you, all my novels were first rate before they were written.”

Despite the commercial success of Sackville-West’s novels and poetry, both women recognized Woolf’s superior artistry. “When I read you,” writes Sackville-West, “I feel no one has ever written English prose before.” In reply, Woolf reminds her friend of the work involved in writing well: “Yes I do write damned well sometimes, but not these last days, when I’ve been slogging through a cursed article, and see my novel [To the Lighthouse] glowing like the Island of the Blessed far far away over dismal wastes, and cant [sic] reach land.”

But for all their literary aspirations, Vita and Virginia were friends who wrote about the common things that women share: food, family, small gifts, gossip about friend’s love affairs. Early in their friendship when Woolf earned money from the publication of Mrs. Dalloway and The Common Reader, she wrote, “And, dearest Vita, we are having two waterclosets made, . . . both dedicated to you.” They pierced their ears together, after which Vita wrote, “Are your ears still sore? Have you enjoyed the sensation of twiddling the rings when they have stuck?” They took only one extended trip together to Burgundy but until the later years, they met in London frequently and dined at each other’s houses like friends do. During the war, Sackville-West sent butter on Christmas Day, eliciting Woolf’s grateful delight: “Oh Vita what a Cornucopia of Bounty you are!”

Woolf and Sackville-West used letters as a space for first creating, then maintaining a long and loyal friendship that survived jealousy, distance, debate, illness, the boredom of predictability, and the distractions of their busy lives. As WWII brought fear that each visit would be their last, their correspondence assured each other of their continuing love and affection. In 1939, when Sackville-West sent Woolf a copy of her book Country Notes, Woolf called it “a dose of sanity and sheep dog in this scratching, clawing, and colding universe.” In April 1940 as bombs fell around their homes, Sackville-West wrote, “Your friendship means so much to me. In fact it is one of the major things in my life—.” And in August, Woolf lamented the bombing near Vita’s Sissinghurst Castle and reaffirmed her love: “What can one say, except that I love you. . . . You have given me such happiness.”

Reading such an intimate friendship between these vital women makes me value my own correspondences with women friends all the more. Email has taken the place of twice-daily postal service by which we can keep in near constant written contact, but the sentiments are the same. Writing to each of my friends has its own timing—some weekly, some monthly, some more intermittent, but all valued for the support they lend to my goals and my sense of self.

One dear friend and I still write letters on stationery and mail them in envelopes with stamps; I look forward to their arrival and read them as Sackville-West did, like children save chocolate. I’ve kept every letter she’s sent in pretty dresser boxes; perhaps someday I’ll read them all straight through again. Another friend mails postcards from her travels; I’ve saved those too, as well as the poems she sends in exchange for my ramblings. And I have stopped corresponding with a few friends when I felt the support became less mutual and interests no longer met.

It seems letter-writing for me, no matter the form, is as important an indication of continuing love and affection for my friends as it was for Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. My friends, near and far, are lively correspondents. How excited I am to find their letters in my mailbox or In-Box. A letter says “I’m thinking of you” and so much more. Preserving our friendship’s history and anticipating its future, we write of ourselves, our dreams, our joys, and our sorrows, trying always to find the right words to say, “Thank you for being my reader.”

Today is the 70th anniversary of Virginia Woolf’s death. Woolf was 59 when she drowned herself in a river near Monk’s House, the country home where she and Leonard then lived.

In 1941, the threat of Hitler invading England was very real; Woolf’s London houses had already been destroyed by bombs and the countryside around Monk’s House had been shelled as well. Woolf suffered most of her life with depression and mental breakdowns; her writing brought stability,despite the anguish it often caused her. Yet even writing failed to provide solace as the war came closer. Amidst the possibility of England’s fall and her own fears of returning madness, Woolf’s despair was evident in the note she left for Leonard before she walked into the river: “Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness.”

As a writer and critic, Woolf expanded the boundaries of literature. Her novels experimented with point-of-view, time, and structure, bringing a unique and feminist voice to a patriarchal literary world. I first read To the Lighthouse as an undergraduate thirty-some years ago and it is still one of my favorite novels. Following its shifting viewpoints is like watching a shell game: despite how closely we observe each movement, we still can’t understand how everything ends exactly as it should.

In my first pearlmoonplenty post, I mentioned that the night before I started graduate school for my PhD, I dreamed that Woolf invited me for tea, which I took as reassurance toward my new endeavor. Woolf was, in fact, a mentor for many young writers, including May Sarton, who had tea with Woolf when Sarton was starting out as a novelist.

Virginia Woolf kept a diary for much of her adult life; after her death, Leonard anthologized the entries about writing into A Writer’s Diary. For the last couple years, I’ve kept this book by my bed, opening it at random every few nights to read a few pages as inspiration for my own writing life. Or maybe less inspiration than support, for Woolf was clear about the difficulties of writing: “Writing is not in the least an easy art. Thinking what to write, it seems easy; but the thought evaporates, runs hither and thither” (May 13, 1933).

Woolf was also honest about the financial aspects of writing, delighting when her books start to make money so she can afford a WC at Monk’s House. It’s Woolf’s blend of practicality and “you go girl!” spirit that draws me to A Writer’s Diary again and again.

In memory of Woolf today, I want to share some of my favorite passages from A Writer’s Diary for all of us who love literature and rejoice in the imaginative life of the mind:

May 11, 1920: It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything. I’m a little anxious. How am I to bring off this conception? Directly one gets to work one is like a person walking, who has seen the country stretching out before. I want to write nothing in this book that I don’t enjoy writing. Yes, writing is always difficult.

May 1, 1925: This is a note for future reference, as they say. The Common Reader [Woolf’s collection of literary criticism] came out 8 days ago and so far not a single review has appeared, and nobody has written to me or spoken to me about it, or in any way acknowledged the fact of its existence; save Maynard, Lydia, and Duncan. . . I have just come through the hoping fearing stage and now see my disappointment floating like an old bottle in my wake and am off on fresh adventures.

March 20, 1026: But what is to become of all these diaries, I asked myself yesterday. If I died, what would Leo make of them? He would be disinclined to burn them; he could not publish them. Well, he should make up a book from them, I think; and then burn the body. I daresay there is a little book in them; if the scraps and scratching were straightened out a little. God knows. This is dictated by a slight melancholia, which comes upon me sometimes now and makes me think I am old; I am ugly. I am repeating things. Yet, as far as I know, as a writer I am only now writing out my mind.

August 12, 1928: We had tea from bright blue cups under the pink light of the giant hollyhock. We were all a little drugged with the country; a little bucolic I thought. It was lovely enough–made me envious of its country peace; the trees all standing securely—why did my eye catch the trees? The look of things has a great power over me. Even now, I have to watch the rooks beating up against the wind, which is high, and still I say to myself instinctively “What’s the phrase for that?” and try to make more and more vivid the roughness of the air current and the tremor of the rook’s wing slicing as if the air were full of ridges and ripples and roughnesses. They rise and sink, up and down, as if the exercise rubbed and braced them like swimmers in rough water. But what a little I can get down into my pen of what is so vivid to my eyes, and not only to my eyes; also to some nervous fibre, or fanlike membrane in my species.

October 11, 1929: And I snatch at the idea of writing here in order not to write Waves or Moths or whatever it is to be called. One thinks one has learnt to write quickly; and one hasn’t. And what is odd, I’m not writing with gusto or pleasure: because of the concentration. I am not reeling it off; but sticking it down. Also, never in my life, did I attack such a vague yet elaborate design; whenever I make a mark I have to think of its relation to a dozen others. And though I could go on ahead easily enough, I am always stopping to consider the whole effect. In particular is there some radical fault in my scheme?[Leonard Woolf considered The Waves “a great work of art, far and away the greatest of her books.”]

November 16, 1931: Oh yes, between 50 and 60 I think I shall write out some very singular books, if I live. I mean I think I am about to embody at least the exact shapes my brain holds. What a long toil to reach this beginning—if The Waves is my first work in my own style!

October 29, 1933: Yesterday the Granta said I was now defunct. Orlando, Waves, Flush, represent the death of a potentially great writer. This is only a rain drop, I mean the snub some little pimpled undergraduate likes to administer, just as he would put a frog in one’s bed. . . . But let me remember that fashion in literature is an inevitable thing; also that one must grow and change. . . . I will not be “famous,” “great.” I will go on adventuring, changing, opening my mind and my eyes, refusing to be stamped and stereotyped. The thing is to free one’s self; to let it find its dimensions, not to be impeded.

August 2, 1934: I’m worried too with my last chapters [of The Years]. Is it all too shrill and voluble? And then the immense length, and the perpetual ebbs and flows of invention. So divinely happy one day; so jaded the next.

November 14, 1934: A note: despair at the book [The Years]: can’t think how I ever could write such stuff—and with such excitement: that’s yesterday: today I think it good again. A note, by way of advising other Virginias with other books that this is the way of the thing: up down up down—and Lord knows the truth.

August 21, 1935: Up in London yesterday. And I saw this about myself in a book at The Times—the most patient and conscientious of artists—which I think is true, considering how I slave at every word of that book.

March 24, 1936: A very good weekend. Trees coming out: hyacinths; crocuses. Hot. The first spring weekend. Then we walked up to Rat Farm—looked for violets. Still spring here. Am tinkering—in a drowsy state. And I’m so absorbed in Two Guineas—that’s what I’m going to call it [later Three Guineas]. I must very nearly verge on insanity I think, I get so deep in this book I don’t know what I’m doing. Find myself walking along the Strand talking aloud.

December 19, 1938: On the whole the art [of writing] becomes absorbing—more? no, I think it’s been absorbing ever since I was a little creature, scribbling a story in the manner of Hawthorne on the green plush sofa at St. Ives while the grown ups dined.

What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk, or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking through them.

Easter Sunday, April 20, 1919

Virginia Woolf again? Don’t worry—I’m not pulling a “Julie and Julia” and my name doesn’t start with “V.” In wondering what this blog will contain, though, I can’t help but include this quote because, in her inimitable style, Woolf has encompassed so much about personal writing in so few words.

Woolf imagined her diary as “loose knit” but not “slovenly.” By “slovenly” did Woolf mean “written in haste without sufficient editing” or perhaps “written without proper attention to detail, without providing enough depth to create a coherent meaning”? Both of these shortcomings are found in journalism today, yet when information comes in such short forms, like blogs, such problems are hard to avoid.

I’m blogging in part because I want to experience what blogging can be as a form and a genre. Unlike blogs, most diaries aren’t written for someone else to read (see Louise Erdrich’s latest novel Shadow Tag for a plot that hinges on deceptive diary keeping and peeping). I’ve been journaling simultaneously in multiple journals for years but never for pubic consumption. How will (hopefully) having readers change how and about what topics I write?

“Capacious hold-all” is my favorite phrase for personal writing like journals, diaries, and blogs that are consecutively and consistently written. I see this blog as a “hold-all” for my ideas about women’s writing and my experiences as a women in her 50s who writes, reads, farms, teaches, cooks, knits, and organizes community in various ways, a woman who is transitioning from one career to many interesting and satisfying occupations, as in “things that occupy my time,” including pearlmoonplenty.

Odd how coming back [to London] upsets my writing mood. Odder still how possessed I am with the feeling that now, aged 50, I’m just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are. . . . I don’t believe in ageing. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun.

Virginia Woolf’s diary, Sunday, October 2, 1932

Where to begin is always the question, so today I start this blog with Virginia Woolf, the writer to whom I turn most often for insight into a woman’s writing life.

Since reaching 50 last year, I’ve kept Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary by my bed, reading entries randomly for insight into her genius and “determination not to give in.” Facing 50, she wrote, “Oh yes, between 50 and 60 I think I shall write some very singular books, if I live. I mean I think I am about to embody at last the exact shape my brain holds.”

Woolf is one of my many mentors; the night before I started graduate school, I dreamed that she invited me for tea. Tea with Virginia Woolf! What better way to assure myself that I was ready to realize my own intellectual voice?

Now, as I alter my aspect toward the sun of less certain but newly imagined years, I turn to Woolf again and find that at 50, she too was poised to follow her own mind wherever it might lead. “Shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are.” Let that be my motto as I round the fullness of 50 like a pearl moon embracing the plenitude of its shine.